The Facade of the Fortune Playhouse.

The Fortune Playhouse was contemporary with Shakespeare's Globe, the Swan and others; it stood in the parish of St Giles-without-Cripplegate, to the west of the Shoreditch locations of the Theatre and the Curtain Theatre. The Fortune was built in 1600, for theatre manager Philip Henslowe and actor Edward Alleyn, in Golding Lane, Cripplegate in the Liberty of Finsbury, north of and outside the City of London, by builder Peter Street. He previously had built the Globe Theatre for the Burbages and the Fortune copied it except for being rectangular rather than a polygon. The plot of land on which the theatre sat was approximately square, 127 feet (39 m) across and 129 feet (39 m) deep. The theatre was built on a foundation of lime and brick; square-shaped (uniquely among the period's amphitheatres), each wall measured eighty feet outside and fifty-five within. The building was three stories tall. The surviving contract specifies a rectangular stage, covered with a roof with the dimensions of the stage as 43 feet wide by 27.5 feet. In 1605, notorious roisterer Mary Frith may have appeared on the stage, singing and playing a lute. The first Fortune Playhouse cost £520, but on 9 December 1621 it burned to the ground, taking with it the company's stock of plays and properties. The second (here), brick-built Fortune Playhouse cost £1100. Some data courtesy of Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License.